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dunmerofskyrim · 8 years ago

Text

A picture. Picture it.

The Thief steals into the eastern sky and the dawn breaks fast on its stars. In pink and blue, they are the first to drown. And then its attendant stars, and then the whole east.

Colour comes back into the world. It pearls and sapphires on the distant sea. Firstlight and frost shiver on another closer ocean and I sit on its shores. The roofs of Old Ebonheart, blue-black and beginning to glitter.

My knees are hugged to my chest. I am swaddled in all the clothes I own and shivering even so. Coat and mantle of goatskin; motley scarf hooded over and round my head. I’m a son of Skyrim, of sorts, bastard though I might be. I ought to know better, for all I’ve known cold far worse. But I only ever learnt Dunmer ways to deal with Nordic winters. My mother always said to wrap my head and grease my ears else the tips would snap off. But I wonder now if I’d’ve been better served spending longer listening to how Nords weather the cold.

Harsh nightfrosts in Ebonheart now, and harsher all the time. Last night was stiff and stilled with cold, as if the air itself were frozen. The chatter and screak of nix sounded through the dark. And I strained my ears to hear them come closer, then fall away. And I strained my eyes to stare out through the blackness, hugging myself, and hugging myself, and dreaming the night full of things I dared not sleep for dreading.

But even if not for fear, hunger keeps me up, or else it’s the cold. The frost finds its way into every corner, and every fold of my clothing, and between every layer I wear. Quiet at first but louder with time, it makes hungry promises about my toes and fingers. A cold and carrion voice. If dawn wakes me, it’s up from a sleep scarce worth sleeping through. So I sit and watch the sky.

My shelter’s a tall warehouse tower. An island three storeys over everything else nearby. Old Ebonheart was a beautiful city at its height. You can tell that even from its ruins. Cut stone, brick, plaster polished to the sheen of an eggshell, or else painted and engraved. They must’ve thought this tower an eyesore even then. It’s built all of timber and creaks in the slightest breeze. A peaked roof with one corner full-collapsed before I ever got here, and the rest turfed thick with moss. Some of the walls, too, creep with it. Black, blue-grey, cat-eye green; fur and algae. I like to think it crams the cracks in the walls that would elsewise let the draught in. It can’t be eaten so might as well earn its keep some other way. I give it the best of the doubt.

I sit amongst the cave-in of scattered wooden clinkers from the broken roof. They strew the floor around me. I look out the breach. Inside and all round me is ransack and wreckage. The shatter of boxes and disturbance of dust. I’m not the first to have been here. What was worth taking’s already been gutted. All that was left for me to take was all it had to give. Its emptiness — I laid claim to that a week ago, no ten days ago. In my journal I’ve begun to tally the days off into sevens. It feels a waste of paperspace, of ink, but what am I saving it for now? Tallies and notes. My botched attempts at sketchmaps. I don’t know that it’s much of a diary anymore. I make no records but memory.

Closer and closer the sun throws its light. I’ll move. Make something of the day. When the sun reaches me, then I’ll move. But it’s hard to imagine it. Hungry, limbs leaden with cold, brain slugging from both, it’s hard to imagine a future here. Just this sitting; this waiting for things to get better.

The tiles around my tower start to shimmer. It’s the failings in the stoneware slats that throw out the brightest light. The imperfections and faults, flickerflashing in glints of new colour. Salts, crystals, minerals — forgotten on this city’s roofs, except by the searching sun. And me maybe.

Outside the yurt that night, on the western edge of Senie, Simra lay awake with his thoughts. He was not pleased with his writing. At best it was joyless, like combing out tangles so bad that shears would’ve done the job better. At worst it felt like picking a scab until the old wound ran new red, and picking and picking on after.

He knew the blighted story, so why was it so hard to get straight? So far as how things wove themselves he knew most of all the answers. Winter in Old Ebonheart, and a hunger and a fear that both made a beast of him and made him feel like the only real person left in the world. Then the world seeming to fill as Spring melted the frosts. Other people, beating the beast out of him, with words and looks and living. Taming him again. The city feeling almost like a city. And the Few in Dyer’s End, and Caselif and all that came after.

Simra knew the story. That was rub enough for him: living as proof of it all. And if he was still writing just for himself then maybe it would be easier. But if not for himself then who was he writing for, and what was it he was writing? Memory or story. Truth or lie or legend. What had he done to warrant the latter? Nothing, he thought, and everything — a life full of all that’d filled it, and nothing much more. He’d be twenty-four in Evening Star. Another Evening Star. Why did Winters come round so often? Who writes a memoir at twenty-four?

Washed in red magelight, Simra leant on the spear he’d taken from the Vereansu they’d fought by the stream. Red and strange-grained wood; halfpoint of its haftlength wrapped in leather; iron head like some oracle’s mask or symbol, one spike leaning forwards, the other hooking back. The buttspike – a scribsticker they’d have called it in the South, but why would anyone want to stick a scrib? – was planted in the ground, rusted already and no doubt rusting further in the damp sod. Simra had told himself he’d sell the spear soon as it stopped being useful. It was a pain to walk or ride with; long and bulky, harder to wear than a sword, even with its carrying straps. But he’d not sold it yet.

The yurt behind him was full of sleeping. Tammunei’s breathing, every out and intake a sigh. Noor’s breathing, a loud silence. For all her charms and protections – the starless night sky overhead as she hid them – they’d been shot at this same evening. Ought to have someone on watch, he’d reckoned, and it might just as well be him.

They’d skirted round the townwalls as evening steeped into night. Soon as they came in bowshot, a clatter of arrows sheared down to tell them so. All but silent until they stuck black lines into the turf and sent the two guar rearing and shying. Warning shots, Simra reckoned, or else they’d have struck their marks. When he’d looked up to the walls he saw lights moving, hurrying atop them: a squabble of archers, debating another volley. Best to fall out of range again before they could reach a verdict.

The walls skirted all the way round. Senie was more fort than town, perched on high ground at the fork of two rivers. It made sense. A hardhold to guard the Plains from what lay east of them, and this valley from what lived on the plains. Something to play sentinel over all who’d ford the river here. What spoilt the sense of it all were the empty fields, the manned walls, the arrows from out the night sky. Closed gates, no doubt. What were they warding off?

They travelled as far in the dark as they dared and pitched camp beside the river. A haze of lights had shown gold in the distance, arrayed on the water’s far side. Trust in dawn to put the night’s happenings together, make sense of them, or so Simra had decided. But the night was too full of questions to let the answer of sleep suffice.

Simra’s mind fell and filled with noise. Like the sound of cicadas, harping senseless in a hot and Summer dark. He shifted his weight between the cold lumps of his booted feet. Almost laughed aloud. A helpless cough of almost-laughter. What kind of prick writes a memoir at twenty-four? It was embarrassing. Hard to tell what he wanted more: to write again, starting over, or to have never started at all.

Uprooting the spear, Simra walked a few pointless steps, then circled round the yurt. One of the guar reached its neck out long and twisted it to look back along its haunches with one cattle-gentle eye. It narrowed a slit pupil against his light; focused on him, then focused on nothing. A translucent lid veiled over its eye as it slipped partway into sleep. Simra wondered if it was still watching though, wary through the lid that clouded its eye more than closed it. A prey beast’s hunted half-sleep. Clever trick if you can do it, he thought. It’d save him his old trick with the kettle, the stone, the palm held closed around it, hanging ready above the other.

He’d asked once, and asked it to someone who ought to know: Why did Saint Vivec write the Sermons? He’d put on his best pious voice; the eager curiosity of ignorance. He’d gone by the name of Lyros then, and that was how Lyros spoke, at least to Meris. Sharp but unpolished, Lyros. Learning, but always humble enough to know there was more to learn. So why write the Sermons?

And Meris had said to him – to Lyros – Why write the Sermons at all, or why write them the way they are written?

Both, he’d said. It had been Spring then. The season’s high crux where Summer shows in at the seams of things, hot and turning the morning mists, heavy and warm as steam, to dust. But Meris’ library was a buried place, half-sunk beneath Suran, and even that afternoon it was cool, and full of the silence of books. Both, he’d said, and neither. Why did Saint Vivec write so much about himself, and so little of it believable?

Saint Vivec was a saint, Meris had answered. Do you know what a saint is? (Of course he knew what a blighted saint was, but she’d tell him anyway.) Someone, she’d said, who in death, is an ancestor not just to their line, but to all Dunmer of faith. Someone, she’d said, who led a life from which others would do well to learn.

Then why tangle it all up? Wrap all the facts in metaphor so tight their truths are muffled. Or hidden. The egg and the simulacrum? It can’t be true.

Vivec lies, Meris said with a shrug and patient smile. There are some in my order who’d say he tells falsehoods to hide the falseness of his godhead. I prefer a more clement reading. Vivec lies to remind the Dunmer of the lessons Black-Hands Mephala once taught us. Words define truth. Lies become stories, and how do we know the world except by tales we tell each other, and tales we tell ourselves? Vivec was born a wretched thing, and lowly. He knew that to be all he could, he would have to change what he had been.

So the Sermons… They change that, and they teach us about the power there is in doing so?

And Meris had answered: If you are to be born a ruling king of the world you must confuse it with new words. The sermons open with the egg, and they too are the egg. A rebirth.

Simra breathed on his fingers now and flexed them, stretching the stiffness from them. They fanned before his eyes. The outer blade of his right palm, bandaged, black with ink, and for what? To tell it aloud and abroad, singular and clear — hadn’t that been his intention, before he’d ever started this mess? But his past, too, was a mess of pasts, and the signs of his passing left in his wake were a scattered seeding of stories, reputations, rumours. The deeds of false names; false mer who’d looked a little like him, in the right light, the right place, the right time.

Bring it all together. Harvest what you’ve sown, Simra. Own it again. Be all you’ve been. Maybe you’ll even learn to live with it. Like flesh slowly swallows the splinter you can’t unstick if only you stop fucking picking at it. Let scab turn to scar.

He unwrapped the bandage on his hand. Outermost three fingers pale and bloodless; scarred to the knuckle and in streaks across his palm, above and below. Who writes a memoir at twenty-four? he thought again, and thought he knew the answer. Someone born wretched, who had lived wretchedly, and lived now with all that defining him. Define him, would it? He’d define it right back. In writing, rewrite it. Not to correct or undo, but to set it straight, and all in his name. Simrin, Katharas, Lyros, Nimmun — all unravelled at the stroke of a pen, till only Simra was left.

He stabbed the spearbutt once more into the ground to stand it there. Crouched and laid his hands to the grass. A muttered calling, and the frost began to melt, the grass to dry and cinder. He sat. Put his satchel over his lap and brought out paper, ink. Began again to write.

“Time to get up,” I say, and do nothing.

Instead I think about the Nords in northern Skyrim who stitch themselves into their Winter clothes – their furs and wools and fleeces – and only bathe again when Spring melts the ice on the ocean. And I think about the coiled copper snake on my left forearm, sinking the pattern of its scales slow into my skin.

Take myself by surprise, that’s the only way. I lurch backward and into my shelter, to go through my things.

On a stand of scavenged rooftiles sits the cast-iron pot I found. I hauled it on a rope up the side of the tower. I did the same with the tiles, filling my gathersack with them and pulling and pulling it, hand over hand, til I could empty and arrange them onto the floor. Four days ago I boiled three racer’s eggs in the pot. Took them from their nest, four streets over. Heated the water with magicka, expending myself til I started to sweat, ache in my head and joints and the pit of my stomach. I didn’t dare brave the smoke of a cookfire. I ate the eggs with salt — nothing else after all to save it for. Nearby, the rags and clothes I bed down in.

I fetch my waterskin from amongst my bags. I tilt it over my mouth and wring a few drops from it.

“You’ll need to go out,” I say. “No food. Last of your water. Best go out.” I speak patois when I’m alone. The Grey Quarter’s hybrid tongue. Not my mothertongue, but the tongue that raised me all the same.

Over my shoulder, smoketrails go up from the city’s overscape. The others are cooking breakfast. The countless others I share this city with, as I try best I can to live beneath their notice. I wonder sometimes: Would they help me if they knew I was here? The answer’s the same, I suppose, to whether I’d help them. So I stay hidden, stay clear, and scavenge and ragpick my way through the city, in fear of sight, of sound — any break in my aloneness.

Down then, by rope and scrabbling feet. Stomach growling, I make towards the nearest trail of smoke. Rooftops and wreckage. Through the shattered top of what once was a glassgarden, I smell meat, the sizzle-sweetness of frying fat. And if ever I had a choice to turn back before, it’s gone now: the first thing my hunger’s devoured in days.

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